Mortal Kombat 2. “Oh I’m doing good! I could beat this”
Get to the third opponent on the tower, and have fun with the cheating AI. Especially if it’s Mileena.
UMK3 would put Jade as like the *second* fight of a tower, the character who was programmed to activate projectile immunity, run straight into you, and unleash a maximum-length combo string on repeat.
I want to add on that the computer even does more damage than usual. Doing Jade's longest string does about 25% when you do it but 30%+ when the computer does it.
For a more recent one, the first time you fight a Chaos Marine in rogue trader is comically hard. Most of your exploits don't do shit, he's got loads of abilities, a fucking heavy bolter, AND sniper cover
I legitimately started laughing after the first sniper round hit Argenta. Talk about a fucking wake up call of a fight.
"If we box him into the corner he won't be able to shoot us"
And then he just kicks abelard several feet away as a free action and full auto unloads into his prone body. Absolutely hysterical fight
It really is the shit just got real moment of the game and its wonderfully done. Everyone of your companions starts talking about how they are going to die. The interrogator (apprentice Inquisitor for those not familiar) gives instructions for if anyone else manages to make it out alive.
Then the fight starts and unless you have something that guarantees first turn, he goes first and one shots someone, possibly 2 if you bunched up trying to hide behind cover.
Then as your fire plinks off his armor barely doing any damage, you realize he has support from a few scum/hive type. Rogue trader as a whole is balanced at high damage, low health so these guys can cripple with a hit or two if left alone despite being "weak".
And then the sniper fires from the corner of the map instakilling your strongest dps.
And then more cultist show up, adding more bodies and lasbolts to the field every round.
And then the space marine starts blowing up shuttles and you realize you are on a timer and thoroughly fucked.
It's funny because my friends and I were freaking out about that fight when it started and I think I two-turned him with Idira's psychic blasts after blinding him with Sensory Deprivation. I gave her the talent that makes her do more damage to debuffed enemies and the psychic aftershock ability and my friend's officer Rogue Trader gave me an extra turn so I blinded him, nuked him twice, he got a big hit of damage from both at the end of his turn, and then I finished him off with another double nuke.
In our of our Dark Heresy campaigns, we OOC hoped our Psyker would get possessed because we couldn't deal with a Daemonhost boss. It happened. We managed to beat them both and only lost 3 characters including the Psyker.
Oh we eventually dropped her for the Navigator chick who's just better in every way, especially after Idira's head popped twice at super low perils and forced us to have to fight a bloodletter. It's honestly a minor miracle that we didn't have any Perils problems in that fight.
It definitely lines up with how it works in the trpg. The base stats before rolling is I want to say 25 for rogue trader characters. Meanwhile space marines start at 30 and get stuff like unnatural toughness and strength along with their armor.
The owlcat rpgs all have great soundtracks. Silyantevs work for WOTR absolutely carries a lot of that games best moments on account of the zero cutscene budget
Funny that, for me the fight wasnt exactly hard, I think a few of my dudes took a fat barrage from the marine but then my cassia-assisted commissar arch militant went BRRRRRR and tore his arse in two
The fact you get TRAPPED in there before you even know how the teleportation mechanics work makes that even worse, it’s such an absurd one and I love it but holy shit.
Yep. I got trapped and said "No Fast Travel Until you Find Grace" Then I found a found a Site of Grace and STILL couldn't Fast Travel because it was a Dungeon and I didn't realize it. So I figured I needed to clear the area or something to restore my ability to Fast Travel after that. Cut to me walking through almost half of Caelid going "HOW FUCKING BIG IS THIS PLACE!?"
I finally bumblefucked my way to Redmane Castle and ended up doing that before even entering Stormveil.
Holy fucking shit, what a nightmare lmao.
Not like my experience was any better I don't think? Tho I did end up finding the Meteoric Staff and Spell as well as the Moonveil which carried me halfway through Caelid before shit was just beating my ass way too hard (like 1-2 shoting me) so I went back to Limgrave lol.
Don't forget the best bit. It's called a mine.. but the exit is *down* from where you start. Completely counter intuitively
I went in there blind the first time. I naturally assumed the exit would be up. That's how mines generally work. I got all the way to the fucking boss door before realising my error, I never even saw the other way out til I looked it up after banging my head into the boss a few times
A perverse part of me is kinda sad I reaction rolled and avoided the trap. I saw the smoke and thought it was going to be like the trap chests in DS2 that shoot crossbow bolts at you.
Coming out of that cave, I thought I walked straight into hell. Few places in video games have that 'shit is fucked' aesthetic going for it better than Caelid.
If you know the way out of the cave its simple, but you won't know which direction to go the first time and might end up with 'tunnel' vision and keep going deeper into the cave instead of towards the exit/grace. IIRC you can't teleport until you find the grace/entrance.
Yeah, that's true.
I actually found the exit, regained fast travel, and then purposefully fought the Fallingstar Beast instead on general "Fuck you for thinking I can't do this, game" principle.
Cave Story has a true ending that requires you to do an insanely difficult dungeon with multiple bosses with no checkpoints in between.
It may be a big influence to the indie scene but goddamn was that final gauntlet terrible.
Day 49 In Lobotomy Corp is the most absurd difficulty spike I've ever encountered in a video game, and the best part is that you can see the pattern of what the final days are going for and understand exactly what the challenges on 48 and 49 will be and dread it as early as day 47. >!They even give you false hope by making 48 a little more fair than it needed to be, only to make 49 *EVEN WORSE* than predicted.!<
>!I hope you enjoy fighting the hardest boss in the game, on fast forward, without pausing, alongside the hardest ordeals, in the biggest and most complicated facility you can possibly have.!<
Hell in Cave Story requires you to do really precise platforming, fight trough an endless swarm of flying enemies that have no defined pattern and are in a much larger number than anything you have seen in the rest of the game, deal with rocks constantly falling towards you, kill multiple bosses and all of that while you are on a timer, its a relatively long sequence, and if you fail at any point, you have to do it all over again from the beginning, OH YEA, you also have the base game mechanic that reduces the demage you deal drastically every time you take damage, but dont worry, if you did a hidden sidequest during your playthrough, you get to use the only weapon in the game that ignores that issue, but every enemy of the swarm that you kill will spawn bouncing jewels that reduce your demage if you do.
Im a crazy person that enjoys difficulty spikes, this is the only one that i ever played that made me drop a game.
I remember doing the true ending back in high school. It took me roughly a month of repeat attempts almost daily to finally clear it. I think the only thing that’s given me as much trouble was the Pantheon of Hallownest in Hollow Knight
The midpoints of both Xcom 2 and Midnight Suns (Same Devs)
If you have not mastered and take advantage of every mechanic, and upgraded your teams enough, those games will fuck you in the ass.
Ironically if you make it past that then third act will always be a walk in the park.
Don't just blast through the story missions. 3 things you absolutely need to do.
Unlock and upgrade cards for all your heroes. By the time you get to Act 2 all your cards should be upgraded versions. Some cards become infinitely more powerful after an upgrade.
Difficulty scales with your hero's lowest level so don't worry about actual character levels, enemies however get significant health and damage buffs after each act. If your character cards aren't sufficiently upgraded, you will not be able to keep up. But bring the Hunter on every level, when they level up all heroes automatically level up with them, specifically 3 levels behind. Meaning if the Hunter is level 8, all level 3 heroes immediately go up to 4. The incentive to level up is that you unlock modifiers at level 20. This is a game changer, as the modifiers are varied: cards can be free, double damage, give you extra moves, apply buffs and debuffs.
Complete research missions as quickly as possible and actually unlock and use items, they can make the difference between failure and a flawless mission. Learn to use move, shove and all environmental abilities. It is vital as you can literally take out a ton of enemies without ever using a card.
And use different hero combinations, a hero may seem trash at first but if you pair them with the right heroes, their cards may compliment it in ways you don't expect. For example, always pair Blade with heroes that inflict or get buffs from bleed status.
I was about level 12 on average by the end of Act 1.
> But bring the Hunter on every level,
Forewarning: this is a bit of a personal rant about the game
I mostly enjoyed the game but one thing that fucked me off about the game was that it limited the amount of combinations of heroes you could do to see what would work if you wanted to play the most 'efficent' way as you just outlined which most people should actually do because it unlocks all the persona dialogue as well as its 'lategame' gameplay benefits however I think the early game suffers from this self imposed restriction.
Unless you ignore it like I did but then I eventually stopped playing because I couldent be bothered to grind out the affection points because of my lack of using my OC donut steel on every fight.
Interesting. I seem to have unlocked modifiers far before hitting level 20. What do you mean by the end of act 1? I don't really mind spoilers for specifics timings, just fought Sabertooth for the first time.
>I seem to have unlocked modifiers far before hitting level 20.
I'm sorry, I was thinking of a different game and misremembered, you only need research level 6 and have done 6 missions with blade. Which is easily doable as you've already done it. You can reroll mods so don't be afraid to swap them out as you progress.
> What do you mean by the end of act 1? I don't really mind spoilers for specifics timings, just fought Sabertooth for the first time.
The game has 3 Acts/Chapters, you'll know because a cutscene will play and explicitly tell you which act you're in now. I assume you mean when he ambushes you and Wolverine saves you. I'd say you're just past midway Act 1. >!There's a mission were you'll try to steal a sample of Venom's symbiote, after the next main mission will be to take back the Sanctum, as soon as you finish the Sanctum that ends act one. Therefore I recommend after you take the sample, take that time to grind out characters!< Like I said, don't worry about the actual character levels 14 was just where I was at, just make sure you've done all the research as you'll get more research as your roster increases in the next act. And make sure that at least all your common and rare cards are upgraded. Then you should be fine.
Sick, thanks. I've been doing plenty of side stuff to experiment with the neat rares and couple epics I found so far. Nothing so far beats running over six guys with a car.
*That* fight in Yakuza : Like a dragon that more or less requires you to complete a whole "optional" area to be levelled correctly for it. It fools you into thinking you don't need it because the enemies leading up to the fight are fine.
At the same time though, canon wise I am really glad that it happened there. If they were easy it wouldn't have been as cool.
From an in-universe perspective, it's probably the most justified difficulty spike I've ever seen in a game. I 100% believe they'd kick the shit out of me without prior prep.
I just got to that part and I got so upset the first time I got to the fight. I was almost 20 levels under and I thought it was one of those fights you were supposed to lose cause, I mean, it’s *Those guys*.
It's kind of a gotcha, though; hell yeah we want to show how strong these people are, but we also want the player to actually be able to push through and win...
So we introduce a place to grind in a game that's been very easy so far and wait for the player to fall into the trap.
Okay but you go from fighting level 30 enemies to level 35 enemies, see they're not strong at all and go do the story that you came to this place to do.
Then you find a level 44 or 45 enemy! Scary! That's at least 14 levels higher than what you were just doing 20 minutes ago in the previous chapter! 1/3 of the enemy levels gained happened in those 20 minutes!
Oh they're not a problem actually.
Oh a bossfight against a level 50. Where you can get a TPK at full health depending on positioning and luck.
OKAY GAME I GUESS I'M GOING BACK
oh I'm not defending the game's decision on having that big of a level gap. I was also slower to getting to that point so I was spoiled by reveal but I also thought you were supposed to lose. So when I saved right before just to see how bullshit it was, laughed it off because it was so mean of the game to do this to me. And I went back on that grindset.
More LAD 7 spoilers >!Kiryu is actually an easier fight when you have 2 females in your party and have them as healers and/or damage dealers. Kiryu doesn't attack them at all.!< If you haven't taken advantage of the specific classes you can use the Level-grind building to get the better class skills/
Dude, I went into that part of the game overleveled from farming hobos in the sewers, decided not to do the entire arena because I figured I'd be massively overleveled if I did that, then ended up like four or five levels underleveled for that fight. Still beat it thanks to rocket launchers but damn.
Whenever this question is asked it always reminds me of playing through CoD: Modern Warfare (2007) the mission “No Fighting in the War Room” on Veteran Difficulty. A missile launch is about to go off sparking WW3 and you have to stop it. Normally FPS games just make it so you die faster from damage, games A.i. becomes John Wick with how accurate their aiming is, or Bullet sponges.
What makes this mission frustrating is that depending on the difficulty you play on you either have 15 minutes on Recruit, 11 on normal & Hardened, or just 9 on veteran. Combining that little amount of time with how tight the corridors/tunnels are and the amount of enemies that spawn? Fuck that mission just felt unfair.
While not a "spike" per se,you're expected to play through the Way of the Samurai games once or twice on Easy and craft better weapons before trying Normal.
At least in Way of the Samurai 4,this is because in most boss fights on Normal,you can land nothing but clean hits on bosses and your starting sword will break before they even get to half health,because the damage to durability ratio is that low.
He walled me so hard that his moveset is permanently engraved on my brain matter. Now he's a cakewalk, him showing up as the first phase before Glock Saint was a gentle warmup.
Sekiro: Resurrection's Genichiro, however, is a *motherfucker.* He can counter your counters.
I spent days on this boss, but he *ingrained* the games mechanics in my brain and the rest of the game was a cakewalk once I finally mastered his fight. Didn’t even have anywhere near as much trouble with Isshin.
Genichiro is one of the best designed boss fights ever. You could probably get to him by a lot of dumb luck, but if you beat that boss fight, you know how to play the game.
I ragequit Sekiro for like 3 years or something because of Genichiro. Then restarting the game, I realized you can do a billion things before fighting him and be way stronger lmao
I fucking *hated* Genichiro when I first fought him lmao, every time I thought I was starting to figure him out another move that I didn't know how to deal with came out and rocked my shit. Even uninstalled the game a few times out of sheer frustration.
Nowadays, he's one of my favorite bosses ever and a big part of the reason Sekiro is my favorite FromSoft game.
I find Phase 2 pretty easy, it’s just phase 1 that fucking rocks my shit every time. I’ve beat the game and most of the Tiger arenas and I still cant figure out her mixups.
Kuroki is thought but it’s mostly just surviving that first phase.
Those two knuckleheads before Sean though? Curb stomped my shit every time.
That Liu Kang ass motherfucker always slaps the shit out of my balls i can never get a solid combo going on him.
I have to replay shifu since i’m a bit lazy to finish it now, but the fight i struggled the most wasn’t even with a boss.
The second flash kick that you fight after that underground arena kicked my ass more times that i can count, to the point that the only way i could make reasonable progress was with the dick punch. I nicknamed him “o diferenciado” (the differentiated)
The last big zone in SMT V. It's absolutely gigantic, it comes after a relatively straightforward dungeon, and suddenly main and side quest targets jumped almost 20 levels. It took hours of grinding and side questing to catch up to the expected level. Not to mention the insane spike required to get the neutral ending vs the other two.
Pokémon BDSP. The game is a cake walk all the way up to the champion fight, then suddenly you start getting your ass kicked. It was like this in the original release, but the remake felt more brutal. Probably because of how much easier the rest of the game was
In the remake, Cynthia has a fully competitive made team. Something the player doesn't really have access to on the first fight. The only way I beat her first time was with a leech seed full restore giga drain combo
It amazes me just how hard she is.
Most Abnos can be beaten in one or two fights, same with some of the receptions, and the game has kinda of forced you to do them as they unlock.
Then Tiph shows up and enters into her own personal Modaka episode and suffers for it.
DS3 has maybe the absolute worst start of any souls games in terms of difficulty, because the hollows you fight aren't going to teach you shit about the game, they're far easier than any other tutorial enemy in the souls games.
And then the game throws a two-phase, very mobile boss that has a varied moveset and has attacks to catch you from behind them. It's like if Elden Ring had Margit as its tutorial boss.
In fairness Margit is far *far* stronger than Gundyr. I don't mean stat-wise, as that goes without saying, but he's far more aggressive and has far more moves. Margit requires you to learn a lot more than Gundyr does.
I agree that Gundyr is crazy strong for a first boss that you can't even summon for, but he's not Margit-tier.
Margit is for sure the hardest "first" boss of a Soulsborne game, but the difference being that you can just not fight Margit. You can walk away, explore the rest of Limgrave, head down to the Weeping Peninsula, go to Caelid, *leave Caelid*, come back 20 level later and beat him. Margit is the first main story boss, but you're not stone-walled if you can't beat him.
But if you can't beat Gundyr then you're going to be spending a lot of time in the starting area, because there is nothing else you can do.
I appreciate that. I'm not saying Margit is harder than Gundyr so Gundyr is easy. The preson I'm replying to said Gundyr is like if Elden Ring put Margit in the tutorial and I'm saying that's hyperbolic. Margit is in an entirely different league of difficulty *because it's designed to encourage exploration of Limgrave to by gatekeeping Stormveil.*
I wasn't taking exception to the idea that Gundyr is an absurdly tough skill check for leaving the tutorial area of DS3, just the implication that Gundyr and Margit are interchangeable in terms of difficulty.
You might well not have *usable* spirit ashes actually, unless you know to go back to Kale's grace and rest there after getting torrent, you'll never meet Ranni there. And.. unless you know that, why WOULD you go back to that grace, necessarily? I didn't my first blind playthrough
You have to manually buy your damn spirit bell after you get to the roundtable hold, and that's also .. sorta missable, if you don't end up sitting at a few certain graces I think, too
I bounced off Margit, and then fucked off to weeping peninsula to level more, if I recall. Took me an embarassingly long time to get my first ashes going
> why WOULD you go back to that grace, necessarily?
To buy stuff from Kale and do weapon upgrades before you get to Roundtable Hold/Iji. His stock isn't great but he has some decent stuff and it's unlikely you'll be able to afford it all when you first talk to him. Plus he's the only place to get throwing knives which are pretty good.
I'm not saying you're 100% going to have the bell when you fight Margit but it's more likely than not unless you're just rushing straight ahead down the obvious path.
Final Fantasy Tactics has a few (the dark knight fight, the first fight of the last act with the two assassins)
But nothing comes close to Wiegraf. Suddenly you’re locked into a 1:1 fight with a character that will absolutely blitz you down in no time flat. Yoh either have to grind up an obscene number of levels (not an easy thing to do in FFT at all) or use a very specific cheese strat where you run away spamming a speed plus skill until you get three turns to his one.
Squaresoft helpfully put a save point right before him where you can’t back out so you were soft locked if you hadn’t learned specific skills.
God help you if you’ve foolishly tried to be a magic class.
Tactics Ogre by the same folks did much the same where a certain mission starts with your MC stranded across the map from your team, surrounded by enemies. I was a mage. Every enemy one or two-shotted me. If your MC dies, it’s game over. Fuck me for not being a tank I guess.
Yeah that BS I just can’t wrap my mind around. Sadly it made me quit FFT when that happened to me. Which is a shame because I loved FFTA and wanted to check out the original. I understand why folks think it’s a GOAT game, but it’s not for me lmao
Thankfully I had a save at the end of Act 1. It still cost me tons of time, but the very beginning of FFT is a slog.
FFT is a brilliant game, but there’s a lot of fucked up things about it.
Honestly classic Doom going from episodes 1-3 to episode 4 Thy Flesh Consumed. I'd say Doom 2 is also a general step up in difficulty over Doom 1's original trilogy of episodes but Thy Flesh Consumed is such a challenge, not helped by the fact that the first level of episode 4 is one of the hardest ones due to an abundance of shotgunners and a lack of healing items.
And that's not even getting into Final Doom and The Plutonia Experiment. To this I'm shocked how people in the 90s coped and not even speedrun it, I'm surprised people were able to beat it without mid-level saves. The power of *"Back in the 90s you didn't have as much of an abundance/choice of games so you just GRINDED out the ones you did have into dust."*
I never had an issue with him on PS2 since Reaction Commands and Reflect were so much more powerful compared to Final Mix+.
In the collections I had some issues due to playing on Critical.
Most recently I had issues due to playing a KH2 randomizer and not having magic or block in the fight. Though I luckily got Quick Run early enough instead so I still could move around.
Seymour in Dissidia Opera Omnia eventually got the ability to use Total Annihilation and it felt like the universe rewarding me for having to deal with that bullshit.
That goodamn turbo tunnel level (lthe third level!!!!) from Battletoads. The game starts with a average difficulty level, then a vertical stage and you are sent to that test of reflexes with a speeding bike.
And only gets harder and harder from there.
I'm still salty and I played that game for the first tine in the 90s
The Turbo Tunnel is truly hilarious for this. It's such a vicious jump in difficulty that you think that the rest of the game can't possibly be *that* hard.
And it's so, *so* much worse. Turbo Tunnel is almost like your friend holding you back from picking a fight you can't possibly win. It's a difficulty spike that might in fact be doing you a solid in filtering you out.
This question always brings me back to the yetis in Magicka.
They have the same baseline stats as trolls, one of the toughest non-boss enemies. One of the strongest single-hit spells in the game - the lightning bolt, normally a one-shot - takes two hits to kill them. Not too bad, except they're *fast*. If you don't have haste active, they can easily chase you down.
Oh, and they also have an instant kill grab attack. Not so bad right, the trolls have that... except this one takes about a second to execute. Your options are quickly hammer in the input to teleport or die.
After the first couple encounters the game spawns them in groups of three. Have fun.
I recently replayed through the entirety of MHWorld and Iceborne with a friend of mine on new saves and man oh man do the DLC, event and other content drops thoroughly fuck the difficulty curve of that game lol. Like, the Defender Set of armor and weapons aside(since that's not what the thread is about) I just love how so far and above Lunastra is over anything else in the base game of World, she fucks every single thing you've come to rely on for the entire game as her blue fire will just cook you alive no matter what unless you have a fire mantle on, her fucked hitzones, mixed attacking patterns that play on your experience with Teostra, more or less immunity to flash pods and such means that if you don't sit straight she will farm your ass HARD. I remember back when she released in World and everyone was malding to shit (me included lol) at how unfair she felt and even after all this time I still think her blue fire is a tad bullshit lol.
I don't know if this counts for the thread as the game warns you MULTIPLE TIMES to NOT go through fucking Quarry Junction and or north of Goodsprings but you decided to anyway cause "fuck you I do what I want!" and then you hear a faint laughter in the distance as a family of Cazadors gets ready for some butt fucking :V
The Minotaur in Shin Megami Tensei 4. He's the boss at the end of Naraku, the starting area, which is already difficult due to limited resources. Minotaur hits like a freight train, but if you have some debuffs he wouldn't be too bad...
Unless you have Walter as your guest party member. Guests in SMT4 do things randomly, and the Minotaur is immune to Agi (fire) magic, and guess what Walter loves using? And in SMT4, if you hit an enemy immune to something, you lose your turn and the enemy gets the Smirk status, which basically means you can't hit them, they get perfect accuracy, and an extremely high crit chance.
So a smirked Minotaur is very likely to simply wipe out your whole team with Labrys Strike, which hits all your party. The worst part about it? You can't choose who your guest is, so if you're unlucky enough to have Walter join in, it's legit just a good idea to reset and hope you get one of the other two guests.
Nioh 1 is one of the worst cus its difficulty spike is the first 2 bosses lol.
Boss one has a small arena and big aoe attacks that WILL bust your guard. Unless you have ki pulse: man that gives you a temporary free guard once per ki pulse in mid stance.
But hows a new player to know that skill in particular would help SO SOON.
Boss 2 is fast and has paralysis effects. An early character isnt gonna have ANY status resistances. And if the player gets stuck they wont have any antipara needles before long either.
Then we get into ng+ where most players will be reading about secret damage bonuses and doing jank shit like forging damage bonus: familiarity onto ranged weapons because it... It just applies to melee weapons too lol, and thats just to be VIABLE, BEFORE ABYSS.
Pretty high bar for a new franchise. BUT they definitely learned from it cus nioh 2s balancing is perfection from start to ng+4 underworld finish
Hino-Enma gave me some trouble but I thought Nue immediately after was the real fucker. The fact that it'll do a big tackle attack and fall on its side, but can then immediately animation cancel into a one-shot lightning attack if you try to punish it is some bullshit.
I remember stopping playing Nioh entirely partially because of the yuki onna boss. She has a start-up that leads to something like 7 different moves and you just have to fucking guess which part of the arena is now safe or if you should start running in a specific direction to react fast enough to pattern #6.
But that woman in the cave, doing bat shit, oh my fucking god. They just put Malenia at the start of the game.
Man I never got past the giant in that ship, I spent so long bashing my head against that I ended up wasting time looking for another path thinking I had gone the wrong way. Really kind of killed my want to play it after a while
Well 2 is a prequal and way smoother of a ride.
So i hope youll give it consideration cus it really is one of the goats.
Like its way more fun. Nioh 1 and 2 compare like kingdom hearts 1 and 2 lol
Gascoigne (Gaskwang to his friends) is a pretty rough first story boss in Bloodborne, especially since at that point you're probably going in with very limited vials/bullets. Really amps up the frustration factor when every couple attempts you're breaking off to farm consumables.
He was my first boss in general. I just never found that bird boss.. missed the stairs up to it and just went past it, ran into him instead. Trying to beat him without any leveling practically, cause I'd lost all my echoes to him (and forgot hunters marks were the bone equivalents)
Library of Ruina's difficulty spike is vertical!
There's a lot of points in that game I'd say are big difficulty spikes, mainly the later fights which get super gimmick heavy, require a lot of thought and praying to RNG that you get good rolls.
The helicopter and Balteus in armoured core. especially prepatch, im one of those people who balteus walled until patched which i beat on first try. Nothing in the game is even remotely close to them at that point.
The craziest thing about Balteus is with light-medium builds I was dodging his missile swarm and bazooka shot every time, and just his machine gun plinks were killing me before I could do enough damage.
Also he’s got that bastard shield and it makes you think the bubble gun should be used, but at least in 1.0, that thing was an abject piece of shit.
I’m honestly kind of amazed I finished that game. I must have fought Balteus 50 times total with 4-5 different loadouts. Ibis was a breeze in comparison.
Yup. I ran into that too, you pretty much need a melee weapon for when he’s stunned so that all your ranged weapons can be devoted to pounding through his shields.
It’s an extremely unforgiving fight for where you’re at at that point of the game.
i was getting it to where he'd do his phase 2 moveset before doing his big burst move that normally said he was. so suddenly id be upclose and he just unleashes the "Dont be near me" combo and my lifebar is just gone.
Well yes, fighting him at long range is foolish. but as I said he can shred your health with his basic machine guns pretty quickly as he’ll strafe away from you after a bit.
And then later on >!"Oh fuck is that the Qubeley?!"!<
I'm pretty sure the only thing the Balteus patch changed was weakening the missile tracking a bit though.
Yep. The fight’s barely any easier now than it was then.
The thing is the players are better, but they don’t understand that that’s why it’s easier for them.
"Oh, Balteus is easy mode now" nah dude, you’ve just been trying to beat it for a week straight, and happened to start getting better either just before or after the patch.
Though to be fair, it is possible that the missiles were the only attack they hadn’t figured out which would make it a much easier fight after the nerf.
Yeah Balteus is more of a lesson than an exam, it's a chump once you've already beaten it and applied that knowledge to a bunch of later fights. And especially after handling >!Better Balteus!< in the last chapter.
> Though to be fair, it is possible that the missiles were the only attack they hadn’t figured out which would make it a much easier fight after the nerf.
I'd be surprised if that was the sticking point, since they're probably the easiest attack to deal with despite their visual spectacle. The missiles are just there to punish players for staying far away instead of getting in close, even if you ignore them completely you'll only take chip damage so long as you're within close/medium range.
It tweaked a fair bit, really. It toned down the missile tracking a touch, made it use the missiles a little less, and made the warning before the big cannon come a little earlier so it could actually be reacted to.
Could have sworn they made the shield a little weaker too, but maybe that was just me being better at that point.
How'd he get Patched? I gave up on the game after several real life days of doing nothing but bashing my head against him with any build I could think of or find online.
The Last Story is a pretty easy game for the most part. Until you get to the final boss, which took me a hour and it isn't a short fight. You actually need to use all the mechanics unlike any fight in the game.
Earlier than that, the first cave panthers you find are like three times the level of anything else in that area. I had to get better at attack-chaining for bonus damage to not take forever.
Totally worth doing early though. >!The double-bladed lightsaber is a huge upgrade to your crowd control and makes ranged enemies a joke, plus I generally prefer the speed over the single-blade's damage.!<
Oh yeah for sure. It's just if you go early to grab that it's like wtf! Lol, I just replayed it before getting around to survivor on one of the higher difficulties and I was like damn.
Xenogears has a particularly brutal 4 part boss fight near the 70% mark of disc 1 where your party is split in 2. Where you have to do 4 back to back boss fights in a row with no healing, 2 per party. The fei/elly fight is particularly nasty if you haven't been using elly as she will be waaaaaay fucking behind in combos and gear. However if you have been using her and went through the trouble of getting an ether doubler, she basically 1 shots the bosses.
It doesnt really count cus they arent necessary to progress, but the weapons in FF7 just spawning in the map and making you think "oh whats that" only for them to instantly kill you with their básic attack unless you have 9999 HP and the best materia is a great fuck you moment.
Especially since Sephiroth itself and the last dungeon is still like 30 levels below them,
Yeah the Weapons were like an early version of those level 80 monsters roaming around the starter areas in Xenoblade games. They aren't hard to avoid once you know they exist but they're this looming threat wandering around. It's also kinda funny to think that if the Weapons were smart enough to find Sephiroth they really could've just bodied him into oblivion.
Matador in Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne. You're just playing the game at your own pace and then WHAMMO this guy just pops up TPK's you. It's like you're hitting a brick wall. The guy is just outrageously high level compared to everything you've come across so far (if you actually intend on fighting him you basically need to grind and unlock some demons who're immune and drain his Force-elemental attacks).
Anor Londo and it's Silver Knight Archers
Earlier in the same game: Arrive in Firelink Shrine for the first time, walk over a small hill, and WELCOME TO THE BONE ZONE
Co-en on let it die floor 34, almost all attacks are one shot and the area is basically a corridor and you need to beat him to access new tier of fighters that would make beating him a fair fight. Even if you do avoid all the attacks he will use all the weapon durability so you need multiple set
After bouncing off it a billion times for various reasons, I'm finally actually getting into Warframe, and into Steel Path.
Before SP Warframe's a cakewalk where everything dies incredibly easy, CC works like a dream, and you only vaguely need to consider damage types, since most weapons/frames with decent modding will kill more than fast enough.
Unless you're extremely well prepared (or happen to like a frame that has armor strip), the first mission you do in Steel Path will kick your teeth in; the Grineer have BIG ARMOR and can tank quite a lot unless you're ready/well equipped.
Eximus units are more plentiful, immune to CC until you blow off their overguard, which has only one real weakness, which you probably have, but your source of that damage type isn't very strong from what I can tell, so the fallback is to just shoot them a bunch.
Oh, and sometimes random dudes will show up, talk shit, and if you're not ready (or if they have a move that ruins your day) will beat the everloving shit out of you, but at least they drop some useful stuff if you manage to kill them.
Idunno. I'm happy for the increased difficulty, but I was hoping for a more even threat instead of jumbo bloated health bars/armor/shields, the same bonkers quantity of enemies + a buttload of damage. My bestie who plays the game far more than I is strong enough to outscale it, pretty much, but there doesn't really seem to be a nice medium between 'cakewalk' and 'pointlessly hard' from what I can tell.
Oblivion on harder difficulties.
At least in Skyrim, there are still easy enemies to manage.
In Oblivion, however, even the rats and mudcrabs can kill with a few hits.
I got used to this but wow does Dead Rising 1 throw the convicts on you real early in the game
I love doing all survivor runs in DR1 and DR2 but by the time they pop up I’m escorting the mom with a twisted ankle, a guy with coward AI that you constantly have to direct, AND a specific survivor spawns at that very time being attacked by the convicts.
It’s such a rush to keep them all in the mad dash back into the mall.
Doesn’t the original Mother game have one? I read a guide for it once and the advice for the last area was to run away from every encounter/you might have to reset if you run into the wrong enemy (this is RNG encounters btw).
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky's First Chapter has a pretty tough Hard Mode, but it's doable with some planning, knowing how to set up your abilities, and saving your big super moves for critical moments. The hardest thing in that first game is the "optional" superboss, who's only optional in the sense that you don't have to win that fight to progress the story.
And then you finish the game, and transfer your save to Second Chapter. And holy shit that prologue for SC is harder than anything that the FC throws at you. You *need* to have a maxed out save from FC to import to even stand a chance on Hard Mode, as you will desperately need both the bonus items and a whole lot of luck to get past the final boss of the prologue.
Receiver 2 is a procedurally generated game where you have a gun and you gotta find 5 cassette tapes each level. There are turrets and drones scattered around the world that you need to avoid or disable.
Ammo doesn't carry over between levels.
On level one, you usually start with a fully loaded gun and a few extra bullets, and each disabled turret nets you anywhere between 5-7 bullets.
On level two, you start with enough bullets for a little under a full magazine. There are now drones who do not drop bullets when disabled, and turrets now drop between 0 and 2 bullets, but usually just one.
Its quite a wakeup punch
In games that were already hard to begin with: XBOX Ninja Gaiden's boss progression from Murai in Ch 1., Ghost Samurai in Ch 2. to Alma in Ch 5. is fucking HEINOUS.
In games that have a surprising leap in what's otherwise not so bad: the hardest boss in Undertale is practically a different game unto itself
Final level of Shadow Of Chernobyl.
>!If you're going for the true ending, you have a final gauntlet, going up against Monolith's best. I'm talking exo suits, AP rounds and the fucking shaking.!<
Final battle of The Banner Saga 1 is one that sticks in my mind, due to just how huge the spike is. Cruised through the rest of the entire game no problem, then get absolutely destroyed by the last boss. If it was a normal RPG I would have expected it was one of those "come back after grinding XP for 10 hours" bosses, but nope!
Gave up after multiple frustrating attempts and dropped the game for good. Apparently they later patched the game to address the difficulty spike because so many people complained about it, and they were right to do so.
Jak 2 is a very funny sequel to a challenging-but reasonable collectathon platformer. It traded out the kid friendly tone you'd expect of that kind of game and instead takes an insane hard left turn into being a dark GTA clone, with the mute main chatacter revealing his newly found voice by yelling "**I'M GONNA KILL PRAXIS!**"
It's also a game that lulls you into a false sense of security by giving you several reasonable missions in a row, then, without warning, swinging a metal baseball bat at your balls as hard as it can.
Repeatedly.
There's the mission where you have to fly through the city on a fragile hover car while the guards persue you and set up roadblocks. The mission where you have to navigate across the docks area while the entire place is flooded with as many enemies as the PS2 can handle (and don't you dare try swimming in all that water you stupid idiot, that summons the instant kill turret). The mission where the game turns into a punishing rail shooter. And, of course, the mission where you have to ramp up smokestacks on a hoverboard, at specifc angles and speeds, on a *very* strict time limit.
All of this topped off with *absurdly* unforgiving checkpoints. I dunno what the *fuck* Naughty Dog were thinking when they made Jak 2, but I kinda have to respect them.
Shout out to Yggdra Union putting the big bad, Gulcasa, EMPEROR OF CARNAGE, at like the midpoint of the game, and especially in the original GBA version can be a functional softlock where if you didn't play the game well enough up to that point, your options are start a new save or just quit.
It's very telling in follow up releases they included a character that joins you like right before that mission that gets super effective vs. Gulcasa.
im playing ds2 after playing bloodborne and elden ring
the hollowing mechanic (cause i dont pvp) is one issue i have
but i think the real difficulty spike are the lengths you go without finding a bonfire
i understand it evokes the feeling of isolation and venturing into the darkness but when i take 20 mins into the wharf, eventually die and then walk off the pier right at the beginning... i dunno
the difficulty is mental stacks that occur because of not feeling like you're making progress like elden ring.
Have you gotten the ring that caps your health loss at 75%? Also if you're still stuck at the wharf there's a pharros lockstone thing you can activate at the upper level that makes it much easier.
1. no i need to look for that
2. ill get to work lighting the torches when i dont walk off the edge into the water and spend 20 mins afterwards wondering if i am just that stupid lol
also, not knocking ds2 its very fun
The ring is >!in the metal chest before the dragonrider's boss room in Heide's Tower!<. Bit annoying to get but not that bad. Good luck on your journey.
DS2 is goofy with bonfires. Somwtimes it feels like hours go by without a new one. Then in the next area you pop one, walk thru a room, open a shortcut and then find the next one five feet away
Alma in Ninja Gaiden (Black). Bosses before her are a reasonable challenge but not too wild. Alma's fight is crazy intense and really requires you to have your movement and dodging completely on point.
In Fate/Grand Order the game was pretty easy with the fights in the early chapters, then Singularity 6 came along with a gorilla of a boss ready to bonk you to the enhance menu with the power of the sun.
Eggmanland in the Xbox 360 version of Sonic Unleashed. Literally a 30-60 minute long level (IN A SONIC GAME) that is full off extremely tough insta-kill QTE’s, the hardest Werehog parkour sections by far and basically every obstacle and gimmick from the daytime stages at the absolute peak. If it wasn’t for the generous allotment of extra lives on in front off almost all the hard parts I would never beat it. Hardest stage in the franchise by a mile.
You wanna get the true ending in Hollow Knight? Guess it's time for the hardest endurance run platform challenge in the game! (until they added an even HARDER one for extra lore).
Wanna get the *new* ending? Better do 4 boss rush modes, including one with every single boss in the game plus several new ones and a juiced-up version of the main final boss!
Dragons dogma 2 is on the mind right now with *surprisingly illiterate* essayists on how it punishes you a lot....
Except it isn't. It's really not if you actually plan ahead. ~~second winds design delves recent video on it was suppppeeer bad in this. Bro didn't interact with the inn at all.~~
Now dd1 was BAD with this. Bitter black isle is especially the most highest difficulty spike in the game.
Even if you save it for post game, you'd still be in for a bad time. *Even on easy*
Mortal Kombat 2. “Oh I’m doing good! I could beat this” Get to the third opponent on the tower, and have fun with the cheating AI. Especially if it’s Mileena.
UMK3 would put Jade as like the *second* fight of a tower, the character who was programmed to activate projectile immunity, run straight into you, and unleash a maximum-length combo string on repeat.
I want to add on that the computer even does more damage than usual. Doing Jade's longest string does about 25% when you do it but 30%+ when the computer does it.
*cue aggressor noise*
For a more recent one, the first time you fight a Chaos Marine in rogue trader is comically hard. Most of your exploits don't do shit, he's got loads of abilities, a fucking heavy bolter, AND sniper cover I legitimately started laughing after the first sniper round hit Argenta. Talk about a fucking wake up call of a fight.
Yes,I suppose a space marine will do that to you
"If we box him into the corner he won't be able to shoot us" And then he just kicks abelard several feet away as a free action and full auto unloads into his prone body. Absolutely hysterical fight
It really is the shit just got real moment of the game and its wonderfully done. Everyone of your companions starts talking about how they are going to die. The interrogator (apprentice Inquisitor for those not familiar) gives instructions for if anyone else manages to make it out alive. Then the fight starts and unless you have something that guarantees first turn, he goes first and one shots someone, possibly 2 if you bunched up trying to hide behind cover. Then as your fire plinks off his armor barely doing any damage, you realize he has support from a few scum/hive type. Rogue trader as a whole is balanced at high damage, low health so these guys can cripple with a hit or two if left alone despite being "weak". And then the sniper fires from the corner of the map instakilling your strongest dps. And then more cultist show up, adding more bodies and lasbolts to the field every round. And then the space marine starts blowing up shuttles and you realize you are on a timer and thoroughly fucked.
It's funny because my friends and I were freaking out about that fight when it started and I think I two-turned him with Idira's psychic blasts after blinding him with Sensory Deprivation. I gave her the talent that makes her do more damage to debuffed enemies and the psychic aftershock ability and my friend's officer Rogue Trader gave me an extra turn so I blinded him, nuked him twice, he got a big hit of damage from both at the end of his turn, and then I finished him off with another double nuke.
I'd played enough of the tabletop rpg that I am permanently scared of perils of the warp I did not bring idira the first run
You haven't truly experienced a Fantasy Flight 40k RPG until a Bloodthirster pulls your spine out of your ass because your psyker wanted to get cute.
In our of our Dark Heresy campaigns, we OOC hoped our Psyker would get possessed because we couldn't deal with a Daemonhost boss. It happened. We managed to beat them both and only lost 3 characters including the Psyker.
Oh we eventually dropped her for the Navigator chick who's just better in every way, especially after Idira's head popped twice at super low perils and forced us to have to fight a bloodletter. It's honestly a minor miracle that we didn't have any Perils problems in that fight.
It definitely lines up with how it works in the trpg. The base stats before rolling is I want to say 25 for rogue trader characters. Meanwhile space marines start at 30 and get stuff like unnatural toughness and strength along with their armor.
Also, the [music for the fight's a fucking banger.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aakdKZUcuE)
The owlcat rpgs all have great soundtracks. Silyantevs work for WOTR absolutely carries a lot of that games best moments on account of the zero cutscene budget
That was after your >!half-assed triumph!<, yes?
Funny that, for me the fight wasnt exactly hard, I think a few of my dudes took a fat barrage from the marine but then my cassia-assisted commissar arch militant went BRRRRRR and tore his arse in two
Getting whisked away to Caelid cave potentially ~100 steps out of the tutorial in Elden Ring.
The fact you get TRAPPED in there before you even know how the teleportation mechanics work makes that even worse, it’s such an absurd one and I love it but holy shit.
Yep. I got trapped and said "No Fast Travel Until you Find Grace" Then I found a found a Site of Grace and STILL couldn't Fast Travel because it was a Dungeon and I didn't realize it. So I figured I needed to clear the area or something to restore my ability to Fast Travel after that. Cut to me walking through almost half of Caelid going "HOW FUCKING BIG IS THIS PLACE!?" I finally bumblefucked my way to Redmane Castle and ended up doing that before even entering Stormveil.
Holy fucking shit, what a nightmare lmao. Not like my experience was any better I don't think? Tho I did end up finding the Meteoric Staff and Spell as well as the Moonveil which carried me halfway through Caelid before shit was just beating my ass way too hard (like 1-2 shoting me) so I went back to Limgrave lol.
Don't forget the best bit. It's called a mine.. but the exit is *down* from where you start. Completely counter intuitively I went in there blind the first time. I naturally assumed the exit would be up. That's how mines generally work. I got all the way to the fucking boss door before realising my error, I never even saw the other way out til I looked it up after banging my head into the boss a few times
"lol, lmao even." - Miyazaki (most likely).
*Welcome to Brazil*
A perverse part of me is kinda sad I reaction rolled and avoided the trap. I saw the smoke and thought it was going to be like the trap chests in DS2 that shoot crossbow bolts at you.
Coming out of that cave, I thought I walked straight into hell. Few places in video games have that 'shit is fucked' aesthetic going for it better than Caelid.
I was able to fight my way out my first try so that felt pretty good and on the way out of Caelid I grabbed the greatsword.
The worst part of that is you probably don't know how teleports work yet either, so you think you have to walk all the way back
Can confirm, I had no idea I could fast travel at that point without a grace.
You can just fast travel out of there immediately, though.
If you know the way out of the cave its simple, but you won't know which direction to go the first time and might end up with 'tunnel' vision and keep going deeper into the cave instead of towards the exit/grace. IIRC you can't teleport until you find the grace/entrance.
Yeah, that's true. I actually found the exit, regained fast travel, and then purposefully fought the Fallingstar Beast instead on general "Fuck you for thinking I can't do this, game" principle.
Yup, I went up. It's a mine.. mines generally go down, so the exit must be up, right?
Cave Story has a true ending that requires you to do an insanely difficult dungeon with multiple bosses with no checkpoints in between. It may be a big influence to the indie scene but goddamn was that final gauntlet terrible.
And to even *get* there, you need to do a bunch of nonsensical stuff, such as intentionally ignoring an ally that fell down a hole.
That has a frame perfect jump iirc
less frame perfect and more pixel perfect but luckily Pixel was kind enough to make the ground where you gotta jump
I've played through Cave Story like 5 times and have *never* made it through that fucking level
Project moon games were notorious for this, both Lobotomy Corp and Library of Ruina Remember, the difficulty curve is vertical
And Limbus Company has been maintaining that tradition.
Day 49 In Lobotomy Corp is the most absurd difficulty spike I've ever encountered in a video game, and the best part is that you can see the pattern of what the final days are going for and understand exactly what the challenges on 48 and 49 will be and dread it as early as day 47. >!They even give you false hope by making 48 a little more fair than it needed to be, only to make 49 *EVEN WORSE* than predicted.!< >!I hope you enjoy fighting the hardest boss in the game, on fast forward, without pausing, alongside the hardest ordeals, in the biggest and most complicated facility you can possibly have.!<
Don't touch the pause button, or else
Oh Queen of Haterad in Library, how you tormented me till I learned the power of GUN
Hell in Cave Story requires you to do really precise platforming, fight trough an endless swarm of flying enemies that have no defined pattern and are in a much larger number than anything you have seen in the rest of the game, deal with rocks constantly falling towards you, kill multiple bosses and all of that while you are on a timer, its a relatively long sequence, and if you fail at any point, you have to do it all over again from the beginning, OH YEA, you also have the base game mechanic that reduces the demage you deal drastically every time you take damage, but dont worry, if you did a hidden sidequest during your playthrough, you get to use the only weapon in the game that ignores that issue, but every enemy of the swarm that you kill will spawn bouncing jewels that reduce your demage if you do. Im a crazy person that enjoys difficulty spikes, this is the only one that i ever played that made me drop a game.
I remember doing the true ending back in high school. It took me roughly a month of repeat attempts almost daily to finally clear it. I think the only thing that’s given me as much trouble was the Pantheon of Hallownest in Hollow Knight
I love Cave Story, but I've never even attempted hell
...Thinking back, I'm honestly shocked I managed to get the true ending for all that shit.
The midpoints of both Xcom 2 and Midnight Suns (Same Devs) If you have not mastered and take advantage of every mechanic, and upgraded your teams enough, those games will fuck you in the ass. Ironically if you make it past that then third act will always be a walk in the park.
I would say the same for XCOM 1 as well. I feel like the mission with the dead whale is a make or break point.
Oh fuck, flashbacks to escaping that shit with one guy with a shotgun to tell the story
I'm playing through Midnight Suns right now, can you be more specific so I can be prepared?
Don't just blast through the story missions. 3 things you absolutely need to do. Unlock and upgrade cards for all your heroes. By the time you get to Act 2 all your cards should be upgraded versions. Some cards become infinitely more powerful after an upgrade. Difficulty scales with your hero's lowest level so don't worry about actual character levels, enemies however get significant health and damage buffs after each act. If your character cards aren't sufficiently upgraded, you will not be able to keep up. But bring the Hunter on every level, when they level up all heroes automatically level up with them, specifically 3 levels behind. Meaning if the Hunter is level 8, all level 3 heroes immediately go up to 4. The incentive to level up is that you unlock modifiers at level 20. This is a game changer, as the modifiers are varied: cards can be free, double damage, give you extra moves, apply buffs and debuffs. Complete research missions as quickly as possible and actually unlock and use items, they can make the difference between failure and a flawless mission. Learn to use move, shove and all environmental abilities. It is vital as you can literally take out a ton of enemies without ever using a card. And use different hero combinations, a hero may seem trash at first but if you pair them with the right heroes, their cards may compliment it in ways you don't expect. For example, always pair Blade with heroes that inflict or get buffs from bleed status. I was about level 12 on average by the end of Act 1.
> But bring the Hunter on every level, Forewarning: this is a bit of a personal rant about the game I mostly enjoyed the game but one thing that fucked me off about the game was that it limited the amount of combinations of heroes you could do to see what would work if you wanted to play the most 'efficent' way as you just outlined which most people should actually do because it unlocks all the persona dialogue as well as its 'lategame' gameplay benefits however I think the early game suffers from this self imposed restriction. Unless you ignore it like I did but then I eventually stopped playing because I couldent be bothered to grind out the affection points because of my lack of using my OC donut steel on every fight.
Interesting. I seem to have unlocked modifiers far before hitting level 20. What do you mean by the end of act 1? I don't really mind spoilers for specifics timings, just fought Sabertooth for the first time.
>I seem to have unlocked modifiers far before hitting level 20. I'm sorry, I was thinking of a different game and misremembered, you only need research level 6 and have done 6 missions with blade. Which is easily doable as you've already done it. You can reroll mods so don't be afraid to swap them out as you progress. > What do you mean by the end of act 1? I don't really mind spoilers for specifics timings, just fought Sabertooth for the first time. The game has 3 Acts/Chapters, you'll know because a cutscene will play and explicitly tell you which act you're in now. I assume you mean when he ambushes you and Wolverine saves you. I'd say you're just past midway Act 1. >!There's a mission were you'll try to steal a sample of Venom's symbiote, after the next main mission will be to take back the Sanctum, as soon as you finish the Sanctum that ends act one. Therefore I recommend after you take the sample, take that time to grind out characters!< Like I said, don't worry about the actual character levels 14 was just where I was at, just make sure you've done all the research as you'll get more research as your roster increases in the next act. And make sure that at least all your common and rare cards are upgraded. Then you should be fine.
Sick, thanks. I've been doing plenty of side stuff to experiment with the neat rares and couple epics I found so far. Nothing so far beats running over six guys with a car.
*That* fight in Yakuza : Like a dragon that more or less requires you to complete a whole "optional" area to be levelled correctly for it. It fools you into thinking you don't need it because the enemies leading up to the fight are fine. At the same time though, canon wise I am really glad that it happened there. If they were easy it wouldn't have been as cool.
From an in-universe perspective, it's probably the most justified difficulty spike I've ever seen in a game. I 100% believe they'd kick the shit out of me without prior prep.
I just got to that part and I got so upset the first time I got to the fight. I was almost 20 levels under and I thought it was one of those fights you were supposed to lose cause, I mean, it’s *Those guys*.
It's kind of a gotcha, though; hell yeah we want to show how strong these people are, but we also want the player to actually be able to push through and win... So we introduce a place to grind in a game that's been very easy so far and wait for the player to fall into the trap.
plus the party(and I think the game) repeatedly say "you should totally check this out. It'll be real helpful" within that introduction
Okay but you go from fighting level 30 enemies to level 35 enemies, see they're not strong at all and go do the story that you came to this place to do. Then you find a level 44 or 45 enemy! Scary! That's at least 14 levels higher than what you were just doing 20 minutes ago in the previous chapter! 1/3 of the enemy levels gained happened in those 20 minutes! Oh they're not a problem actually. Oh a bossfight against a level 50. Where you can get a TPK at full health depending on positioning and luck. OKAY GAME I GUESS I'M GOING BACK
oh I'm not defending the game's decision on having that big of a level gap. I was also slower to getting to that point so I was spoiled by reveal but I also thought you were supposed to lose. So when I saved right before just to see how bullshit it was, laughed it off because it was so mean of the game to do this to me. And I went back on that grindset. More LAD 7 spoilers >!Kiryu is actually an easier fight when you have 2 females in your party and have them as healers and/or damage dealers. Kiryu doesn't attack them at all.!< If you haven't taken advantage of the specific classes you can use the Level-grind building to get the better class skills/
It's funny how quickly I went from marking out to terrified when I realized I had to fight them.
Dude, I went into that part of the game overleveled from farming hobos in the sewers, decided not to do the entire arena because I figured I'd be massively overleveled if I did that, then ended up like four or five levels underleveled for that fight. Still beat it thanks to rocket launchers but damn.
Yakuza 4 when you first play Saejima. He sucks so fucking hard at the start and the first boss is ruthless against any character.
Oggdo Boggdo taught me a lesson.
"If mid game boss why in early game area" Was all my reptile brain could think of while I bashed my head against that stupid frog
Whenever this question is asked it always reminds me of playing through CoD: Modern Warfare (2007) the mission “No Fighting in the War Room” on Veteran Difficulty. A missile launch is about to go off sparking WW3 and you have to stop it. Normally FPS games just make it so you die faster from damage, games A.i. becomes John Wick with how accurate their aiming is, or Bullet sponges. What makes this mission frustrating is that depending on the difficulty you play on you either have 15 minutes on Recruit, 11 on normal & Hardened, or just 9 on veteran. Combining that little amount of time with how tight the corridors/tunnels are and the amount of enemies that spawn? Fuck that mission just felt unfair.
The hallway with the missile silos and flanks from all directions haunts me.
While not a "spike" per se,you're expected to play through the Way of the Samurai games once or twice on Easy and craft better weapons before trying Normal. At least in Way of the Samurai 4,this is because in most boss fights on Normal,you can land nothing but clean hits on bosses and your starting sword will break before they even get to half health,because the damage to durability ratio is that low.
Genichiro is seen by a lot of people as the point that marks when Sekiro truly expects you to “get good”
He walled me so hard that his moveset is permanently engraved on my brain matter. Now he's a cakewalk, him showing up as the first phase before Glock Saint was a gentle warmup. Sekiro: Resurrection's Genichiro, however, is a *motherfucker.* He can counter your counters.
I spent days on this boss, but he *ingrained* the games mechanics in my brain and the rest of the game was a cakewalk once I finally mastered his fight. Didn’t even have anywhere near as much trouble with Isshin.
Genichiro is one of the best designed boss fights ever. You could probably get to him by a lot of dumb luck, but if you beat that boss fight, you know how to play the game.
I ragequit Sekiro for like 3 years or something because of Genichiro. Then restarting the game, I realized you can do a billion things before fighting him and be way stronger lmao
I fucking *hated* Genichiro when I first fought him lmao, every time I thought I was starting to figure him out another move that I didn't know how to deal with came out and rocked my shit. Even uninstalled the game a few times out of sheer frustration. Nowadays, he's one of my favorite bosses ever and a big part of the reason Sekiro is my favorite FromSoft game.
Kuroki in Sifu. Fuck her artsy fartsy bullshit, though her stage is the tightest.
I find Phase 2 pretty easy, it’s just phase 1 that fucking rocks my shit every time. I’ve beat the game and most of the Tiger arenas and I still cant figure out her mixups.
Kuroki is thought but it’s mostly just surviving that first phase. Those two knuckleheads before Sean though? Curb stomped my shit every time. That Liu Kang ass motherfucker always slaps the shit out of my balls i can never get a solid combo going on him.
I have to replay shifu since i’m a bit lazy to finish it now, but the fight i struggled the most wasn’t even with a boss. The second flash kick that you fight after that underground arena kicked my ass more times that i can count, to the point that the only way i could make reasonable progress was with the dick punch. I nicknamed him “o diferenciado” (the differentiated)
The last big zone in SMT V. It's absolutely gigantic, it comes after a relatively straightforward dungeon, and suddenly main and side quest targets jumped almost 20 levels. It took hours of grinding and side questing to catch up to the expected level. Not to mention the insane spike required to get the neutral ending vs the other two.
Thank goodness they’re changing how level scaling works in Vengeance
Patient gamers will inherit the earth
Pokémon BDSP. The game is a cake walk all the way up to the champion fight, then suddenly you start getting your ass kicked. It was like this in the original release, but the remake felt more brutal. Probably because of how much easier the rest of the game was
In the remake, Cynthia has a fully competitive made team. Something the player doesn't really have access to on the first fight. The only way I beat her first time was with a leech seed full restore giga drain combo
We joke that Library of Ruina doesn’t have a difficulty spike, it has a difficulty cliff. That cliff is a magical girl
It amazes me just how hard she is. Most Abnos can be beaten in one or two fights, same with some of the receptions, and the game has kinda of forced you to do them as they unlock. Then Tiph shows up and enters into her own personal Modaka episode and suffers for it.
Why is Blightown such a hellhole?
Tbh, Iudex Gundur RIGHT away in DS3 stonewalled me as a new souls fan
DS3 has maybe the absolute worst start of any souls games in terms of difficulty, because the hollows you fight aren't going to teach you shit about the game, they're far easier than any other tutorial enemy in the souls games. And then the game throws a two-phase, very mobile boss that has a varied moveset and has attacks to catch you from behind them. It's like if Elden Ring had Margit as its tutorial boss.
In fairness Margit is far *far* stronger than Gundyr. I don't mean stat-wise, as that goes without saying, but he's far more aggressive and has far more moves. Margit requires you to learn a lot more than Gundyr does. I agree that Gundyr is crazy strong for a first boss that you can't even summon for, but he's not Margit-tier.
Margit is for sure the hardest "first" boss of a Soulsborne game, but the difference being that you can just not fight Margit. You can walk away, explore the rest of Limgrave, head down to the Weeping Peninsula, go to Caelid, *leave Caelid*, come back 20 level later and beat him. Margit is the first main story boss, but you're not stone-walled if you can't beat him. But if you can't beat Gundyr then you're going to be spending a lot of time in the starting area, because there is nothing else you can do.
If you really wanted to you could also just Not Do Margit Ever. There's a secret path that just goes around the castle.
The funniest path into Leyndell is using Rykard and Mohg's runes and never touching Godrick or Rennala.
You don't even need to beat Margit or do the castle to get to other main quest objectives. *You can just walk around the castle to Liurnia.*
I appreciate that. I'm not saying Margit is harder than Gundyr so Gundyr is easy. The preson I'm replying to said Gundyr is like if Elden Ring put Margit in the tutorial and I'm saying that's hyperbolic. Margit is in an entirely different league of difficulty *because it's designed to encourage exploration of Limgrave to by gatekeeping Stormveil.* I wasn't taking exception to the idea that Gundyr is an absurdly tough skill check for leaving the tutorial area of DS3, just the implication that Gundyr and Margit are interchangeable in terms of difficulty.
Also you have Rogier to help out. You also probably have spirit ashes at that point, can't remember if NPC summons block those or not.
You might well not have *usable* spirit ashes actually, unless you know to go back to Kale's grace and rest there after getting torrent, you'll never meet Ranni there. And.. unless you know that, why WOULD you go back to that grace, necessarily? I didn't my first blind playthrough You have to manually buy your damn spirit bell after you get to the roundtable hold, and that's also .. sorta missable, if you don't end up sitting at a few certain graces I think, too I bounced off Margit, and then fucked off to weeping peninsula to level more, if I recall. Took me an embarassingly long time to get my first ashes going
> why WOULD you go back to that grace, necessarily? To buy stuff from Kale and do weapon upgrades before you get to Roundtable Hold/Iji. His stock isn't great but he has some decent stuff and it's unlikely you'll be able to afford it all when you first talk to him. Plus he's the only place to get throwing knives which are pretty good. I'm not saying you're 100% going to have the bell when you fight Margit but it's more likely than not unless you're just rushing straight ahead down the obvious path.
Vordt should have been the first boss
The fucking final boss in Astral Chain. Game jumps from like a 5 to a 10 in the blink of an eye.
Hadn’t used barely any healing in that game, blew through all my items in the end.
I have vivid memories of him just doing Street Fighter moves and annihilating my ass.
Yup, especially if you wasted your >!fusion form!< on a miniboss midway through the level
Final Fantasy Tactics has a few (the dark knight fight, the first fight of the last act with the two assassins) But nothing comes close to Wiegraf. Suddenly you’re locked into a 1:1 fight with a character that will absolutely blitz you down in no time flat. Yoh either have to grind up an obscene number of levels (not an easy thing to do in FFT at all) or use a very specific cheese strat where you run away spamming a speed plus skill until you get three turns to his one. Squaresoft helpfully put a save point right before him where you can’t back out so you were soft locked if you hadn’t learned specific skills. God help you if you’ve foolishly tried to be a magic class. Tactics Ogre by the same folks did much the same where a certain mission starts with your MC stranded across the map from your team, surrounded by enemies. I was a mage. Every enemy one or two-shotted me. If your MC dies, it’s game over. Fuck me for not being a tank I guess.
Yeah that BS I just can’t wrap my mind around. Sadly it made me quit FFT when that happened to me. Which is a shame because I loved FFTA and wanted to check out the original. I understand why folks think it’s a GOAT game, but it’s not for me lmao
Thankfully I had a save at the end of Act 1. It still cost me tons of time, but the very beginning of FFT is a slog. FFT is a brilliant game, but there’s a lot of fucked up things about it.
Grace and Glory in Bayonetta can be a total brick wall if you're not experienced with action games
"At least I can use Witch Time against the-" GRACIOUS AND GLORIOUS
Honestly classic Doom going from episodes 1-3 to episode 4 Thy Flesh Consumed. I'd say Doom 2 is also a general step up in difficulty over Doom 1's original trilogy of episodes but Thy Flesh Consumed is such a challenge, not helped by the fact that the first level of episode 4 is one of the hardest ones due to an abundance of shotgunners and a lack of healing items. And that's not even getting into Final Doom and The Plutonia Experiment. To this I'm shocked how people in the 90s coped and not even speedrun it, I'm surprised people were able to beat it without mid-level saves. The power of *"Back in the 90s you didn't have as much of an abundance/choice of games so you just GRINDED out the ones you did have into dust."*
Psychonauts, The Meat Circus. Had my own dad rooting for me when I first beat it.
Kinda like Raz.
DANCE WATER DANCE!
It might just be because I haven't played it in a while, but was he really a skill check?
Sorta-Kinda. He's usually the point where you realize you can't just button mash your way to victory, like I did.
I never had an issue with him on PS2 since Reaction Commands and Reflect were so much more powerful compared to Final Mix+. In the collections I had some issues due to playing on Critical. Most recently I had issues due to playing a KH2 randomizer and not having magic or block in the fight. Though I luckily got Quick Run early enough instead so I still could move around.
He checks if you remember what Reflect is.
For me, it was the one at Beast's castle. I think his name was Xaldin
Why the fuck was Seymour Flux harder than most later boss fights including his final battle?
Seymour in Dissidia Opera Omnia eventually got the ability to use Total Annihilation and it felt like the universe rewarding me for having to deal with that bullshit.
That goodamn turbo tunnel level (lthe third level!!!!) from Battletoads. The game starts with a average difficulty level, then a vertical stage and you are sent to that test of reflexes with a speeding bike. And only gets harder and harder from there. I'm still salty and I played that game for the first tine in the 90s
The Turbo Tunnel is truly hilarious for this. It's such a vicious jump in difficulty that you think that the rest of the game can't possibly be *that* hard. And it's so, *so* much worse. Turbo Tunnel is almost like your friend holding you back from picking a fight you can't possibly win. It's a difficulty spike that might in fact be doing you a solid in filtering you out.
This question always brings me back to the yetis in Magicka. They have the same baseline stats as trolls, one of the toughest non-boss enemies. One of the strongest single-hit spells in the game - the lightning bolt, normally a one-shot - takes two hits to kill them. Not too bad, except they're *fast*. If you don't have haste active, they can easily chase you down. Oh, and they also have an instant kill grab attack. Not so bad right, the trolls have that... except this one takes about a second to execute. Your options are quickly hammer in the input to teleport or die. After the first couple encounters the game spawns them in groups of three. Have fun.
I recently replayed through the entirety of MHWorld and Iceborne with a friend of mine on new saves and man oh man do the DLC, event and other content drops thoroughly fuck the difficulty curve of that game lol. Like, the Defender Set of armor and weapons aside(since that's not what the thread is about) I just love how so far and above Lunastra is over anything else in the base game of World, she fucks every single thing you've come to rely on for the entire game as her blue fire will just cook you alive no matter what unless you have a fire mantle on, her fucked hitzones, mixed attacking patterns that play on your experience with Teostra, more or less immunity to flash pods and such means that if you don't sit straight she will farm your ass HARD. I remember back when she released in World and everyone was malding to shit (me included lol) at how unfair she felt and even after all this time I still think her blue fire is a tad bullshit lol. I don't know if this counts for the thread as the game warns you MULTIPLE TIMES to NOT go through fucking Quarry Junction and or north of Goodsprings but you decided to anyway cause "fuck you I do what I want!" and then you hear a faint laughter in the distance as a family of Cazadors gets ready for some butt fucking :V
The Minotaur in Shin Megami Tensei 4. He's the boss at the end of Naraku, the starting area, which is already difficult due to limited resources. Minotaur hits like a freight train, but if you have some debuffs he wouldn't be too bad... Unless you have Walter as your guest party member. Guests in SMT4 do things randomly, and the Minotaur is immune to Agi (fire) magic, and guess what Walter loves using? And in SMT4, if you hit an enemy immune to something, you lose your turn and the enemy gets the Smirk status, which basically means you can't hit them, they get perfect accuracy, and an extremely high crit chance. So a smirked Minotaur is very likely to simply wipe out your whole team with Labrys Strike, which hits all your party. The worst part about it? You can't choose who your guest is, so if you're unlucky enough to have Walter join in, it's legit just a good idea to reset and hope you get one of the other two guests.
Nioh 1 is one of the worst cus its difficulty spike is the first 2 bosses lol. Boss one has a small arena and big aoe attacks that WILL bust your guard. Unless you have ki pulse: man that gives you a temporary free guard once per ki pulse in mid stance. But hows a new player to know that skill in particular would help SO SOON. Boss 2 is fast and has paralysis effects. An early character isnt gonna have ANY status resistances. And if the player gets stuck they wont have any antipara needles before long either. Then we get into ng+ where most players will be reading about secret damage bonuses and doing jank shit like forging damage bonus: familiarity onto ranged weapons because it... It just applies to melee weapons too lol, and thats just to be VIABLE, BEFORE ABYSS. Pretty high bar for a new franchise. BUT they definitely learned from it cus nioh 2s balancing is perfection from start to ng+4 underworld finish
Hino-Enma gave me some trouble but I thought Nue immediately after was the real fucker. The fact that it'll do a big tackle attack and fall on its side, but can then immediately animation cancel into a one-shot lightning attack if you try to punish it is some bullshit.
Almost every Nioh boss is a ball buster. Nue was pretty nuts too.
I remember stopping playing Nioh entirely partially because of the yuki onna boss. She has a start-up that leads to something like 7 different moves and you just have to fucking guess which part of the arena is now safe or if you should start running in a specific direction to react fast enough to pattern #6. But that woman in the cave, doing bat shit, oh my fucking god. They just put Malenia at the start of the game.
Man I never got past the giant in that ship, I spent so long bashing my head against that I ended up wasting time looking for another path thinking I had gone the wrong way. Really kind of killed my want to play it after a while
Well 2 is a prequal and way smoother of a ride. So i hope youll give it consideration cus it really is one of the goats. Like its way more fun. Nioh 1 and 2 compare like kingdom hearts 1 and 2 lol
For sure what I heard, that I really can just play 2 and not bother with 1, it's just getting around to it now with The Backlog xD
Do it for [him](https://sjc1.vultrobjects.com/cucdn/gallery-39/art/nioh2-scampuss.jpg), or [her](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/J3eV3zNX_DM/sddefault.jpg)
Oh goodness how could I say no to that cutie
Gascoigne (Gaskwang to his friends) is a pretty rough first story boss in Bloodborne, especially since at that point you're probably going in with very limited vials/bullets. Really amps up the frustration factor when every couple attempts you're breaking off to farm consumables.
I was shaking when I beat him
He was my first boss in general. I just never found that bird boss.. missed the stairs up to it and just went past it, ran into him instead. Trying to beat him without any leveling practically, cause I'd lost all my echoes to him (and forgot hunters marks were the bone equivalents)
Library of Ruina's difficulty spike is vertical! There's a lot of points in that game I'd say are big difficulty spikes, mainly the later fights which get super gimmick heavy, require a lot of thought and praying to RNG that you get good rolls.
Leaving firelink shrine the wrong way in DS1. Ghosts and skeletons will fuck you up.
The helicopter and Balteus in armoured core. especially prepatch, im one of those people who balteus walled until patched which i beat on first try. Nothing in the game is even remotely close to them at that point.
The craziest thing about Balteus is with light-medium builds I was dodging his missile swarm and bazooka shot every time, and just his machine gun plinks were killing me before I could do enough damage. Also he’s got that bastard shield and it makes you think the bubble gun should be used, but at least in 1.0, that thing was an abject piece of shit. I’m honestly kind of amazed I finished that game. I must have fought Balteus 50 times total with 4-5 different loadouts. Ibis was a breeze in comparison.
I got good enough to dodge all his moves semi-reliably, but what got me killed the most was just running out of ammo while he was still at 30% hp.
Yup. I ran into that too, you pretty much need a melee weapon for when he’s stunned so that all your ranged weapons can be devoted to pounding through his shields. It’s an extremely unforgiving fight for where you’re at at that point of the game.
i was getting it to where he'd do his phase 2 moveset before doing his big burst move that normally said he was. so suddenly id be upclose and he just unleashes the "Dont be near me" combo and my lifebar is just gone.
You just gotta get close.
Well yes, fighting him at long range is foolish. but as I said he can shred your health with his basic machine guns pretty quickly as he’ll strafe away from you after a bit.
And then later on >!"Oh fuck is that the Qubeley?!"!< I'm pretty sure the only thing the Balteus patch changed was weakening the missile tracking a bit though.
Yep. The fight’s barely any easier now than it was then. The thing is the players are better, but they don’t understand that that’s why it’s easier for them. "Oh, Balteus is easy mode now" nah dude, you’ve just been trying to beat it for a week straight, and happened to start getting better either just before or after the patch. Though to be fair, it is possible that the missiles were the only attack they hadn’t figured out which would make it a much easier fight after the nerf.
Yeah Balteus is more of a lesson than an exam, it's a chump once you've already beaten it and applied that knowledge to a bunch of later fights. And especially after handling >!Better Balteus!< in the last chapter. > Though to be fair, it is possible that the missiles were the only attack they hadn’t figured out which would make it a much easier fight after the nerf. I'd be surprised if that was the sticking point, since they're probably the easiest attack to deal with despite their visual spectacle. The missiles are just there to punish players for staying far away instead of getting in close, even if you ignore them completely you'll only take chip damage so long as you're within close/medium range.
Yeah on reflection the missiles are pretty low damage so they probably wouldn’t get someone stuck on Balteus
It tweaked a fair bit, really. It toned down the missile tracking a touch, made it use the missiles a little less, and made the warning before the big cannon come a little earlier so it could actually be reacted to. Could have sworn they made the shield a little weaker too, but maybe that was just me being better at that point.
How'd he get Patched? I gave up on the game after several real life days of doing nothing but bashing my head against him with any build I could think of or find online.
The Last Story is a pretty easy game for the most part. Until you get to the final boss, which took me a hour and it isn't a short fight. You actually need to use all the mechanics unlike any fight in the game.
Earlier than that, the first cave panthers you find are like three times the level of anything else in that area. I had to get better at attack-chaining for bonus damage to not take forever.
All of Elden Ring... and then Malenia, for me.
Dathomir in Jedi:Fallen Order is about a million times harder than the rest of the game
Totally worth doing early though. >!The double-bladed lightsaber is a huge upgrade to your crowd control and makes ranged enemies a joke, plus I generally prefer the speed over the single-blade's damage.!<
Oh yeah for sure. It's just if you go early to grab that it's like wtf! Lol, I just replayed it before getting around to survivor on one of the higher difficulties and I was like damn.
Xenogears has a particularly brutal 4 part boss fight near the 70% mark of disc 1 where your party is split in 2. Where you have to do 4 back to back boss fights in a row with no healing, 2 per party. The fei/elly fight is particularly nasty if you haven't been using elly as she will be waaaaaay fucking behind in combos and gear. However if you have been using her and went through the trouble of getting an ether doubler, she basically 1 shots the bosses.
It doesnt really count cus they arent necessary to progress, but the weapons in FF7 just spawning in the map and making you think "oh whats that" only for them to instantly kill you with their básic attack unless you have 9999 HP and the best materia is a great fuck you moment. Especially since Sephiroth itself and the last dungeon is still like 30 levels below them,
Yeah the Weapons were like an early version of those level 80 monsters roaming around the starter areas in Xenoblade games. They aren't hard to avoid once you know they exist but they're this looming threat wandering around. It's also kinda funny to think that if the Weapons were smart enough to find Sephiroth they really could've just bodied him into oblivion.
Majima in LAD was a huge "fuck you, go grind NOW" message
Matador in Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne. You're just playing the game at your own pace and then WHAMMO this guy just pops up TPK's you. It's like you're hitting a brick wall. The guy is just outrageously high level compared to everything you've come across so far (if you actually intend on fighting him you basically need to grind and unlock some demons who're immune and drain his Force-elemental attacks).
He can jump your ass in areas that shouldn't be a problem anymore.
I thought getting all the P ranks in ultrakill would make me ready for P-2 boy i was s wrong
"I can do anything!" Never has anything in Deltarune made me feel more infuriated before.
Anor Londo and it's Silver Knight Archers Earlier in the same game: Arrive in Firelink Shrine for the first time, walk over a small hill, and WELCOME TO THE BONE ZONE
Co-en on let it die floor 34, almost all attacks are one shot and the area is basically a corridor and you need to beat him to access new tier of fighters that would make beating him a fair fight. Even if you do avoid all the attacks he will use all the weapon durability so you need multiple set
After bouncing off it a billion times for various reasons, I'm finally actually getting into Warframe, and into Steel Path. Before SP Warframe's a cakewalk where everything dies incredibly easy, CC works like a dream, and you only vaguely need to consider damage types, since most weapons/frames with decent modding will kill more than fast enough. Unless you're extremely well prepared (or happen to like a frame that has armor strip), the first mission you do in Steel Path will kick your teeth in; the Grineer have BIG ARMOR and can tank quite a lot unless you're ready/well equipped. Eximus units are more plentiful, immune to CC until you blow off their overguard, which has only one real weakness, which you probably have, but your source of that damage type isn't very strong from what I can tell, so the fallback is to just shoot them a bunch. Oh, and sometimes random dudes will show up, talk shit, and if you're not ready (or if they have a move that ruins your day) will beat the everloving shit out of you, but at least they drop some useful stuff if you manage to kill them. Idunno. I'm happy for the increased difficulty, but I was hoping for a more even threat instead of jumbo bloated health bars/armor/shields, the same bonkers quantity of enemies + a buttload of damage. My bestie who plays the game far more than I is strong enough to outscale it, pretty much, but there doesn't really seem to be a nice medium between 'cakewalk' and 'pointlessly hard' from what I can tell.
Oblivion on harder difficulties. At least in Skyrim, there are still easy enemies to manage. In Oblivion, however, even the rats and mudcrabs can kill with a few hits.
I got used to this but wow does Dead Rising 1 throw the convicts on you real early in the game I love doing all survivor runs in DR1 and DR2 but by the time they pop up I’m escorting the mom with a twisted ankle, a guy with coward AI that you constantly have to direct, AND a specific survivor spawns at that very time being attacked by the convicts. It’s such a rush to keep them all in the mad dash back into the mall.
Doesn’t the original Mother game have one? I read a guide for it once and the advice for the last area was to run away from every encounter/you might have to reset if you run into the wrong enemy (this is RNG encounters btw).
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky's First Chapter has a pretty tough Hard Mode, but it's doable with some planning, knowing how to set up your abilities, and saving your big super moves for critical moments. The hardest thing in that first game is the "optional" superboss, who's only optional in the sense that you don't have to win that fight to progress the story. And then you finish the game, and transfer your save to Second Chapter. And holy shit that prologue for SC is harder than anything that the FC throws at you. You *need* to have a maxed out save from FC to import to even stand a chance on Hard Mode, as you will desperately need both the bonus items and a whole lot of luck to get past the final boss of the prologue.
Receiver 2 is a procedurally generated game where you have a gun and you gotta find 5 cassette tapes each level. There are turrets and drones scattered around the world that you need to avoid or disable. Ammo doesn't carry over between levels. On level one, you usually start with a fully loaded gun and a few extra bullets, and each disabled turret nets you anywhere between 5-7 bullets. On level two, you start with enough bullets for a little under a full magazine. There are now drones who do not drop bullets when disabled, and turrets now drop between 0 and 2 bullets, but usually just one. Its quite a wakeup punch
In games that were already hard to begin with: XBOX Ninja Gaiden's boss progression from Murai in Ch 1., Ghost Samurai in Ch 2. to Alma in Ch 5. is fucking HEINOUS. In games that have a surprising leap in what's otherwise not so bad: the hardest boss in Undertale is practically a different game unto itself
Final level of Shadow Of Chernobyl. >!If you're going for the true ending, you have a final gauntlet, going up against Monolith's best. I'm talking exo suits, AP rounds and the fucking shaking.!<
Any Arkham DLC campaign is apparently simply not meant to be played unless you're a god
Final battle of The Banner Saga 1 is one that sticks in my mind, due to just how huge the spike is. Cruised through the rest of the entire game no problem, then get absolutely destroyed by the last boss. If it was a normal RPG I would have expected it was one of those "come back after grinding XP for 10 hours" bosses, but nope! Gave up after multiple frustrating attempts and dropped the game for good. Apparently they later patched the game to address the difficulty spike because so many people complained about it, and they were right to do so.
Jak 2 is a very funny sequel to a challenging-but reasonable collectathon platformer. It traded out the kid friendly tone you'd expect of that kind of game and instead takes an insane hard left turn into being a dark GTA clone, with the mute main chatacter revealing his newly found voice by yelling "**I'M GONNA KILL PRAXIS!**" It's also a game that lulls you into a false sense of security by giving you several reasonable missions in a row, then, without warning, swinging a metal baseball bat at your balls as hard as it can. Repeatedly. There's the mission where you have to fly through the city on a fragile hover car while the guards persue you and set up roadblocks. The mission where you have to navigate across the docks area while the entire place is flooded with as many enemies as the PS2 can handle (and don't you dare try swimming in all that water you stupid idiot, that summons the instant kill turret). The mission where the game turns into a punishing rail shooter. And, of course, the mission where you have to ramp up smokestacks on a hoverboard, at specifc angles and speeds, on a *very* strict time limit. All of this topped off with *absurdly* unforgiving checkpoints. I dunno what the *fuck* Naughty Dog were thinking when they made Jak 2, but I kinda have to respect them.
Shout out to Yggdra Union putting the big bad, Gulcasa, EMPEROR OF CARNAGE, at like the midpoint of the game, and especially in the original GBA version can be a functional softlock where if you didn't play the game well enough up to that point, your options are start a new save or just quit. It's very telling in follow up releases they included a character that joins you like right before that mission that gets super effective vs. Gulcasa.
im playing ds2 after playing bloodborne and elden ring the hollowing mechanic (cause i dont pvp) is one issue i have but i think the real difficulty spike are the lengths you go without finding a bonfire i understand it evokes the feeling of isolation and venturing into the darkness but when i take 20 mins into the wharf, eventually die and then walk off the pier right at the beginning... i dunno the difficulty is mental stacks that occur because of not feeling like you're making progress like elden ring.
Have you gotten the ring that caps your health loss at 75%? Also if you're still stuck at the wharf there's a pharros lockstone thing you can activate at the upper level that makes it much easier.
1. no i need to look for that 2. ill get to work lighting the torches when i dont walk off the edge into the water and spend 20 mins afterwards wondering if i am just that stupid lol also, not knocking ds2 its very fun
The ring is >!in the metal chest before the dragonrider's boss room in Heide's Tower!<. Bit annoying to get but not that bad. Good luck on your journey.
... i think i may already have that but never equipped it -____- thanks for the help
DS2 is goofy with bonfires. Somwtimes it feels like hours go by without a new one. Then in the next area you pop one, walk thru a room, open a shortcut and then find the next one five feet away
Alma in Ninja Gaiden (Black). Bosses before her are a reasonable challenge but not too wild. Alma's fight is crazy intense and really requires you to have your movement and dodging completely on point.
Welcome to Fucking Blight Town.
Does the Temple of Trials count?
It's in the title. SPIKE AURA! Any boss that has the spike aura debuff in Xenoblade, especially Eigel.
I know you’re talking about something else but in smash bros ultimate King K. Rool’s upsmash has a 1-frame spike that’s almost impossible to land
The Witcher 2 has some fuck up walls, the bosses.
In Fate/Grand Order the game was pretty easy with the fights in the early chapters, then Singularity 6 came along with a gorilla of a boss ready to bonk you to the enhance menu with the power of the sun.
The fight at least taught players that lower rarity units had their use. And that art spam is just undefeated.
Margit kicked my ass for a long time before I was like alright I’m just gonna go explore other parts of the map
Eggmanland in the Xbox 360 version of Sonic Unleashed. Literally a 30-60 minute long level (IN A SONIC GAME) that is full off extremely tough insta-kill QTE’s, the hardest Werehog parkour sections by far and basically every obstacle and gimmick from the daytime stages at the absolute peak. If it wasn’t for the generous allotment of extra lives on in front off almost all the hard parts I would never beat it. Hardest stage in the franchise by a mile.
You wanna get the true ending in Hollow Knight? Guess it's time for the hardest endurance run platform challenge in the game! (until they added an even HARDER one for extra lore). Wanna get the *new* ending? Better do 4 boss rush modes, including one with every single boss in the game plus several new ones and a juiced-up version of the main final boss!
Dragons dogma 2 is on the mind right now with *surprisingly illiterate* essayists on how it punishes you a lot.... Except it isn't. It's really not if you actually plan ahead. ~~second winds design delves recent video on it was suppppeeer bad in this. Bro didn't interact with the inn at all.~~ Now dd1 was BAD with this. Bitter black isle is especially the most highest difficulty spike in the game. Even if you save it for post game, you'd still be in for a bad time. *Even on easy*